Eskimo (1934)

It’s probably important to note that Eskimo is not a documentary. It’s based upon two novels by a Danish explorer familiar with the Arctic and, presumably, Alaska where the movie is set. The film does provide some anthropological interest in its depictions of aspects of life in a small village – activities like salmon fishing, duck hunting, walrus hunting. However, once you realize that, clearly, many of these scenes were shot using rear projection, and that the actors are nowhere actually near the walrus or the polar bear, the film becomes more of a rather tawdry tale of revenge. Mala (played by Native American actor Ray Mala) is the best hunter in his village, and many take advantage of his prowess to keep them alive in the harsh climate. It doesn’t take long, though, for the film to throw us a curve by showing that Eskimo husbands let close friends have sex with their wives. I mean, I guess they really have to be close friends and it’s only when the friend is lonely because they’ve been widowed or something, but still, that’s a strange custom, not one very supportive of women’s desires. It becomes even stranger when Mala goes with his wife Aba (the lovely Lulu Wong Wing) to a trading ship that’s been trapped in the ice. He meets a white captain (played in an intriguing bit of casting by Peter Freuchen, the author of the novels that were the source of the plot), who trades a rifle for furs and then rapes Aba after demanding that Mala let her stay on the ship for the night. Despite promises that he will not molest Aba again, the captain rapes her again while Mala is gone on a whale hunt with the sailors. When she leaves the ship, the ship’s mate accidentally shoots and kills her by mistake, thinking that she’s a seal lying on the frozen ground. Mala harpoons the captain – you knew that his skill at harpooning whales would come in handy later – and then returns home to his children and village. Mala remains haunted for a long time over Ada’s death and his killing of the captain, but he feels renewed when he gets a new name (Kripik), which no one seems to remember to call him, and a visiting friend gives him one of his wives so that Mala will no longer be alone. If that’s not enough of a melodramatic plot, the Mounties show up and start investigating old cases, particularly ones involving native people. They learn about Mala’s killing of the captain and try to question him, but he doesn’t quite understand their intentions. He manages to escape by injuring his hands pulling them through handcuffs. He tries to return home, but the weather is particularly brutal. He has to start eating his sled dogs in order to survive, and he's almost killed by a wolf when he’s near death. It’s a wild movie in terms of one character’s arc. The ending is a bit of a happy one even though it initially seems like Mala and his new wife Iva (Lotus Long) may be committing suicide by leaping onto an ice floe. Eskimo was filmed using the native language Inupiat with intertitles translating into English. The pronoun usage, though, is still tough to understand, at least initially. “One” means “I,” and “someone” means “you.” Reading the intertitles takes some effort because the grammatical structure is different, but given all that happens to Mala and his family, some pronoun confusion is the least of our concerns as viewers. On a final note, here’s a bit of Oscar trivia: Eskimo was the first film ever to win an Oscar for editing; the category was added to the list of honors for 1934 films.

Oscar Win: Best Film Editing

One Night of Love (1934)

The chief reason to watch One Night of Love, nominated for Best Picture of 1934, is to see the performance of Grace Moore. Moore was a star with the Metropolitan Opera who made several films in the 1930s, none of which is particularly memorable today. In this film, Moore plays Mary Barrett, an aspiring singer, who at the beginning of the film is performing the title song as a part of a radio contest. Whoever wins the singing competition gets to study for two years with famed maestro Guilio Monteverdi (played by Tullio Carminati). Mary loses the competition but decides to take her savings and move to Italy to study and live anyway. She refuses to listen to the advice of her mother, played by an uncredited Jane Darwell: "But that place is full of Italians." I suppose they knew what that meant in 1934.

It isn't long, of course, before Mary has spend all of her money while waiting for her big break. She lives in Milan in a building that features performers of every type of musical instrument, and apparently, the only way she can quieten them down is to sing. Her roommate, a painter, has been trying to get her to take a job at the Cafe Roma, but Mary wants to hold out for the world of opera to discover her. Ironically, after she takes the job, which does involve her singing now and then (a rousing version of "Finiculi, Finicula"), she is discovered by Monteverdi himself, who is having lunch with his pianist. He has just dismissed his previous pupil (and lover), Lally (played by Mona Barrie), and he is now ready to take on another student. He promises to make Mary a star if she will only listen to his directions and vow never to fall in love with him. Given that she has a young man who's already in love with her, Bill Houston (Lyle Talbot), and given how much of a bore Monteverdi is, you'd think this would be easy for her.

As I was watching One Night of Love, I realized just how indebted American filmmakers were to the early Soviet directors. Where would the early sound movies be without a montage, like the one here meant to show the various locations throughout Europe where "La Barrett" performs on her way to becoming an opera superstar? Intercutting trains, crowds, fliers, and snippets of performances, the longest montage is quite a marvel, frankly. I know you're probably thinking that I must have been somewhat bored by the plot in order to pay attention to the editing, and you'd be right.

Frankly, you should know where all of this is headed anyway. It's all pretty standard stuff, really. Bill proposes to Mary, and Monteverdi makes his case for her love as well. Lally reappears just at the worst possible time, and there's a misunderstanding between Mary and Monteverdi about Lally. Since this is a movie about opera and performance, you also know that there will be questions along the way of whether or not Mary will be able to overcome her fears that she isn't good enough. I suppose much of this was not a cliche back in 1934, but it has all become cliched by now.

Moore, though, is an engaging actress, and it's worth watching the movie for her performance. She is so bright and cheery, especially when she sings. And she sings beautifully. She does numbers from La Traviata, Carmen, and Madame Butterfly, and even though I am not particularly a fan of opera music, I enjoyed the numbers. This is one of those movies that lets you see the numbers as they would have been performed in practice or on the stage itself rather than having people break into song in a way that is unrelated directly to the plot. There are several significant moments that take place on stage, and watching Moore perform these numbers gives you a real sense of why she was such a star of the Metropolitan Opera and why Hollywood wanted to make her into a movie star as well.

It Happened One Night (1934)

It Happened One Night, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1934, is a charming romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert as two people who meet and fall in love under some strange circumstances. This film is often called one of the earliest screwball comedies. It is certainly the combination of verbal humor and farcical situations that are the source of its success. This was the first movie to win the top five awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay), and it deserved them all. In fact, it received every Oscar for which it was nominated, and that happens very rarely when there are multiple nominations. Only standout films are able to break into that special company, and It Happened One Night was the one that got there first in both cases.

Colbert is Ellie Andrews, a rich young woman who has defied her father and married an aviator. Her father (Walter Connolly) is holding her hostage on his yacht in Miami, and she jumps overboard and swims to shore with plans to escape to New York to be with her new husband, King Westley (Jameson Thomas). In an attempt to avoid the press, she buys a bus ticket for an overnight trip. She meets Gable's Peter Warne, a newspaperman who's a bit down on his luck, while fighting over the last seat on the bus. Gable inevitably discovers her identity and agrees to accompany her to New York if he can have the exclusive rights to her story, thereby getting him back his old newspaper job. She has very little money remaining after her luggage is stolen, and he plans to assist her until he can be reimbursed for his expenses.

What follows is a series of misadventures. Ellie is late returning to the bus one morning and is surprised to find that it has already left despite her telling the driver to wait for her; she's a bit uninformed about the way the "real world" tends to operate. She and Peter wind up spending the night together in an auto camp (an early form of a motel) when another bus gets stuck in the mud. They have to share a third night on a farm sleeping on piles of hay (separate ones, of course). Through all of this, they begin to like each other more and more, but of course, you knew that would happen, didn't you? All I can say is to remember that such a storyline wasn't yet a cliche in 1934.

The performances by Gable and Colbert (as well as the supporting cast) are great. Gable gets several drunk scenes and a few scenes where he's "allowed" to show his temper. When you put this performance next to his work in Mutiny on the Bounty and Gone with the Wind, you realize just how talented an actor Gable truly was, how much of a range he had. Colbert is his equal here, at turns maddeningly naive and then stunningly radiant. It's easy to see why any of the men in the movie fall in love with her. And the wedding dress she wears late in the film is quite the stunner after watching her in the same jacket and skirt for more than an hour.

Two famous scenes in particular are worthy of note. Everyone is already familiar with Peter's failed attempts to hitch a ride from one of the passing cars, only to have Colbert's Ellie raise her skirt and stop the first car that passes by. It still a funny scene, one that earns its laughs just as honestly now as it did then. You see it almost any time that a clip from the movie is show and deservedly so. It captures the gender politics of the film quite astutely. The other famous moment is the "Walls of Jericho" scene in the auto camp when Peter hangs a blanket between the two beds in order to give them a sense of privacy in the small room they share. To get the full effect of that moment, though, you'll have to stay for the end of the movie. However, I'd like to talk about the first time they are together with just a blanket between them. Legend has it that when Gable took off his shirt and revealed that he wasn't wearing an undershirt, sales of men's undershirts plummeted and never quite fully recovered. That's a pretty clear example of the power that the medium of film is capable of displaying.

Director Frank Capra was perhaps the most famous director in Hollywood during the Great Depression. What is admirable about this and other movies he helmed during that time is the attention that he gives to the poor people of the United States. Ellie may be rich, but during her trip to New York, she is surrounded by those who are less fortunate, and she has several instances where she has to realize that wealth does not make her better than other people. Even Peter has to point out to her that she doesn't know how to dunk her donut in coffee properly and that her father never even taught her how to ride piggyback the correct way. There's no overt class warfare in the film, but Capra never lets you forget that you're watching a movie about a member of the idle rich learning how to live like all of those people without money.

I can't say that I truly understand why the film is entitled It Happened One Night. The events happen over several nights. Well, actually, they occur over several weeks. However, that's a relatively small criticism when you've got such a delightful film overall. You'd be hard pressed to find many wrong notes in it, and true to the fashion of the time, you get the happy ending you deserve.

The Thin Man (1934)

Did anyone ever really drink as much as William Powell's Nick Charles in The Thin Man, a nominee for Outstanding Production of 1934? I stopped counting after he had downed more than a dozen drinks in the brisk 91 minutes of this film. Is anyone able to function as well as Nick does while drinking? Could that person still be a brilliant detective who can see and interpret clues that escape the police? I started to think that he even drank in his sleep, particularly since there are bottles and glasses conveniently located in his bedroom. Yes, I know that the drinking is part of the charm of the series of Thin Man films that Powell and Myrna Loy, as Nick's wife Nora, starred in, but it is one of those plot points that makes you stop and think. Not for very long, though, as you get caught up in the sharp wordplay of this charming movie.

Interestingly, the film doesn't even begin with Nick and Nora. Instead, we are given the context for the mystery they (well, really, he) will be asked to solve. An eccentric inventor named Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) plans to go into seclusion for a while in order to complete work on his latest invention, one he's trying to keep secret. His daughter, Dorothy (a very young and delightful Maureen O'Sullivan), interrupts him at work to ask him to attend her wedding. He promises to return in time for the event. Before he can leave to continue his work, though, he has to retrieve some money that he believes his mistress, Julia Wolf, has taken from him. Julia (Natalie Moorehead) has indeed been stealing bonds from Wynant's safe and is reluctant to turn it over to him until he threatens to turn her in to the police.

There’s a fast forward to several months later, and we see Powell's Nick trying to teach some bartenders how to shake a proper martini. Dorothy confronts him and asks for his help in searching for her father, who's now been gone for weeks without any contact. Nick, however, is reluctant to go back to his life as an investigator. His wife's father has died and left him and Nora a fortune, and they've been enjoying a much more casual life in California. It’s only when the bodies start to pile up that he becomes intrigued and that Nora encourages him to get involved.

Wynant's ex-wife and Dorothy's mother, Mimi (a rather shrill Minna Gombell), decides that she deserves some money from her ex-husband, and the only way to reach him is apparently through his mistress. When Mimi arrives at Julia's apartment, though, she discovers the woman has been recently killed. Given that no one else knows where Wynant is, the police and the public begin to suspect that the inventor is the chief suspect. The case then gets even more interesting. A potential blackmailer is gunned down in the street when he tries to collect his money, and a third body is discovered buried in Wynant's laboratory. All the while, the newspapers keep the spotlight on Wynant as the suspect, a testament perhaps to the lurid nature of some news outlets of the time. And there are also rumors aplenty to report. There's an allegation that Wynant has tried to commit suicide in Allentown which the papers pick up and carry. Wherever he goes in public, and even sometimes in the comfort of his own home, Nick gets grilled by reporters who want to know more about the case even before he agrees to do any investigations.

(As a quick aside, I must confess to enjoying the montages of newspaper front pages in old movies. It became a cliché rather quickly, a short of shorthand to keep from taking up too much of the screen time with exposition, but watching the sheer silliness of some of the outrageous headlines always puts me in a good mood. And when other images such as people’s eyes (perhaps to suggest suspicion or surveillance) or paperboys or even just cityscapes are added in, well, I’m hooked.)

With Nora’s encouragement, Nick begins to collect clues and starts investigating the increasing numbers of murders that are related to the case. He starts to figure out who the most likely suspects are and decides to invite them all, along with some other key figures in the case, to a dinner where he plans to reveal the true identity of the murderer. It's quite a party when the cops and various underworld figures sit down to eat. It's reminiscent of the scenes in later detective films where all of the suspects are gathered together for the big reveal--I'm thinking here of the Hercule Poirot films like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, for example, that I saw in the 1970s--but The Thin Man is an earlier, standard-creating example of this plot device.

While it sounds like this could be a film about serious stuff, it certainly isn't. It's a bright, cheerful comedy, one with some very sexy banter between the two leads and some inspired reaction shots from almost everyone. And the sequence involving the dinner party is very carefully choreographed to achieve the maximum number of laughs. Imagine any "real" detective asking everyone to dress up so as to be accused of murder. Almost every sequence is played for laughs, and it makes for a very entertaining movie to watch.

Powell and Loy are so good here. They act like a happily married couple, two people who enjoy spending time with each other. They also don't seem to take anything too seriously. When Nick sends Nora off to Grant's Tomb to keep her away from the investigation, she tells him upon her return, "It's lovely. I'm having a copy made for you." Even Nick's being shot at is handled for laughs here. When they read accounts in the paper about his encounter with a gunman in their bedroom, they first note that the Tribune says Nick was shot twice but, as Nora puts it, "you were shot five times in the tabloids." Nick's reply: "That's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids." Funny stuff.

By the way, their dog almost steals the film. Asta, who also appeared to great effect in The Awful Truth, is given some of the best reaction shots in the film. For example, Nick allegedly takes Asta for a walk when he's really going to Wynant's laboratory, and watching Asta hide there when Nick claims that the dog is vicious is pretty hilarious. I know it's also become a bit of a cliché to see a scene like that in films nowadays, but The Thin Man managed to achieve a laugh with that joke decades before everyone tried to copy it to lesser effect.

The Thin Man is the first in a series of films based upon the characters created by novelist Dashiell Hammett. This first one is definitely one of my new favorites, primarily thanks to the interplay between Powell and Loy. The rest of the supporting cast is first-rate as well, especially O'Sullivan as the daughter who's willing to take the rap for her accused father. It’s clear to see why she later became a star. You might also notice Cesar Romero in a small part as the new boyfriend of Dorothy's mother; I almost didn't recognize him without that crown of white hair for which he became famous later in his career. And, for some reason, I found the character of Gilbertt, Wynant's son played by William Henry, to be quite entertaining. He's meant to be an intellectual, someone who lives his life in books, and he's the butt of quite a few jokes with his questions about "sadists" and "paranoiacs."

Perhaps the best way to honor the achievements of The Thin Man is to raise a glass, maybe a martini. Or maybe you could develop a drinking game whereby you have to take a drink each time the main characters do. Expect, however, to be quite drunk by the end of the film. I did mention earlier how much drinking goes on in this movie. When Loy's Nora asks for a row of five martinis so that she can catch up with Powell's Nick, you know you're in for a heavy-drinking time. And only Powell could get away with telling a reporter who keeps asking questions about the case that "it's putting me way behind in my drinking." I think that, by the end of the film, he and Nora may have caught up.

Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Production, Actor (William Powell), Directing (W.S. Van Dyke), and Writing, Adaptation